Number of suicides in County Roscommon revealed

There were 31 suicides in County Roscommon between 2019 and 2022, a HSE West Regional Health Forum was told.

According to Central Statistics Office information provided by the HSE, there were six suicides in 2019, eight in 2020, 11 in 2021, and six in 2022. In the same time period, there were 77 in County Galway, 25 in Galway city, 51 in County Mayo, 42 in County Sligo, and seven in County Leitrim.

“Death due to intentional self-harm is classified as an unnatural death and therefore, must be referred to the coroner for investigation,” the HSE said.

“This investigation can take a protracted length of time to complete for various reasons (such as getting medical reports, health and safety reports, an engineer’s report, and the involvement of the Director of Public Prosecutions etc.) and this delays the registration of such deaths.”

However, the HSE noted that this CSO data was published in different stages and was subject to revisions.

“These numbers are not easily comparable across different years – at any given time, data for different years is at different stages,” it said.

Sligo County Councillor Donal Gilroy sought the information and stressed the importance of the figures. “I think these are figures we need to know,” he said. “There’s anecdotal evidence that suicides are running massively out of hand.” He said he had asked this question in the past but due to Covid there was no coroner’s court sitting and no response was available.

He said that the figures should inform the operations of the mental health service. He added that he knew of one case of a person who was “turned away” from the mental health service and who was found dead the next day.

“It is very hard to know what you could do to stop that person,” the councillor said. “But it is very sad and hard on a family when that happens.” He said that it seemed that nationally if Gardaí believe that a person was at risk of self-harm, if that person was under the influence of an intoxicant, “they are not being admitted” to mental health facilities.

He asked that both of these comments be sent to the mental health services.